The cry of the anti-abortion feminist

In the ongoing debate over women’s health care, one voice has been mostly absent: that of the anti-abortion feminist.

Most cultural conservatives have correctly focused their attention on the constitutional issues at stake, in particular the threat to religious liberty posed by the Obama administration’s mandate that religious employers underwrite their employees’ abortion-inducing drugs, contraceptives and sterilization procedures.

Story Continued Below

Many liberal women, meanwhile, have eagerly embraced the role of victim, advancing the idea that women are casualties of a “war on women.” Women are now, as various cultural liberals have put it, “facing sexual McCarthyism” from “conservative cavemen” who want to return to the “Dark Ages.”

But women are not a monolith. And there is a growing group of passionate young women who are transforming what it means to be a woman. Allow me to introduce them to you. We are women who reject both the anti-male feminism of the 1960s and the “girls gone wild” mentality that’s pervasive today.

We are women for whom the idea of artificial birth control as “preventive care” is deeply insulting.

We are women who view the intentional killing of children not as a constitutional right, a matter of privacy or a necessary evil but, rather, as profoundly anti-woman and the antithesis of love.

We are women whose lives contradict the idea of an inevitable clash between religious liberty and women’s health. We are women who believe that something precious is lost when fertility is intentionally excluded from marriage, a sacred bond and a total giving of each spouse to the other.

We are women who believe that sex and pregnancy aren’t just health issues; they are also inextricably linked with family, morals, faith and values. And we are women who love everything about being a woman, including being mothers. We have noticed that the rise in the availability and use of cheap birth control coincided with increases in the rates of sex addiction, divorce, unmarried childbearing and abortion.

We have also noticed that while contraceptives and legal abortion promised to eliminate the exploitative attitude of men toward women, they have had the opposite effect.

We shook our heads when we learned of law student/activist Sandra Fluke’s implausible assertion that contraceptives are too expensive for her friends to purchase and that, therefore, her Roman Catholic school should be forced to pay for them. We continued shaking our heads when we heard Rush Limbaugh’s misogynistic remarks about Fluke. Perhaps most revealing was his suggestion that she be required to perform in sex videos in return for free contraceptives.